Republicans Coming Up Short

 

Republicans thought they had good reasons for expecting to do very well in the midterm elections. Biden was unpopular as was his policy of de facto opening the southern border to illegal immigrants. Price inflation was driving real incomes down. Many people were worried about crime, and many Democrats were ignoring their fears and sometimes seeming to side with the criminals. The end of the Afghanistan war had been a fiasco, and people were questioning the way governments handled the Covid epidemic, especially in schools. On the other hand Republicans already held 212 seats in the house after unusually gaining several in 2020, and all but one of the senate seats they hoped to gain and a couple of the ones they had to to defend were in states Biden carried in 2020. Still they were optimistic about having big gains in the house and gaining enough for a majority in the senate. They were wrong. Depending on a runoff in Georgia the number of Republicans in the senate will be the same as or one less than it is now. They gained enough in the house for a majority, but only a slight one. Relative to their expectations the election was a failure for them. Many Republicans are asking what went wrong.

There are some obvious conjectures. According to the news, the Democrats main selling points were defending legal abortion, claiming Republicans wanted to cut social security, and accusing them of being a “threat to democracy”. The Republicans helped the Democrats out on all three. The general understanding in the country after the supreme court reversed Roe v. Wade was that the government of each state would make its own laws on abortion, leaving access to abortion unchanged in blue states with pro-choice governors or majorities in their legislatures. Then weeks before the election Republican senator Lindsey Graham announced a plan to ban abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy everywhere in the country by an act of congress. Such a bill would never have passed, and would have been vetoed by Biden if it did, but by proposing it, Graham helped the Democrats convince some women that a Republican congress would outlaw abortion. Another senator Rick Scott gave the Democrats a hand on social security by proposing sun-setting federal programs every five years without having the good sense to exempt social security and medicare from his plan explicitly. The Democrats’ scare stories on both issues were dishonest, but foolish mistakes by prominent Republicans made them seem more plausible to some people.

Then there was the Democrats’ pitch on a threat to democracy. There the Republicans failed not so much by what they did as by what they did not do. After losing the election in 2020, Donald Trump tried to stay in office through a coup d’etat. Republicans refused to vote to impeach and convict him, and very few even spoke against him. Then weeks before the election this year, he demanded to be returned to power immediately. Even he probably was not ignorant enough not to know there were no legal or constitutional means for that to happen. Republican officials surely were not. They had to know that what the man was calling for was overthrowing the government of the United States. If any prominent Republican denounced him over it, I missed it in the news. While the Democrats exaggerated the threat in their campaign, since nothing did or would come of Trump’s schemes and rants, the man was an ex- and would be future president from the Republican party. Republicans had a responsibility to do something about him, and they didn’t. That (along with some of the odd Trumpist Republican candidates in some races) made it easier for Democrats to convince people that this year a vote for Democrats was a patriotic vote for the laws and Constitution of the republic.

A person can wonder about the Republicans, as Casey Stengel is said to have wondered about the 1962 Mets, whether anyone there can play the game. If so the first step should be a break with Trump, both for their good and the good of the country. Many of them may not care that it is the ethical thing to do, but perhaps they finally will realize it is also the expedient one.